John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

Galt had grasped the nature of the “long game” of national survival that Macdonald was playing. It’s a shame, in hindsight, that the two never really became partners.

  In fact, Macdonald was dead wrong about the readiness of the government of a war-weary America to risk a new conflict, even if against a lion now starting to show signs of its age. The vast armies mobilized during the Civil War had been demobilized down to a minimalist fifty thousand. He was right absolutely, though, that Canada was passing through a period of exceptional peril in which, at the same time that some American leaders were looking expectantly northwards, their equivalents in Britain were doing their best to look the other way. Among possible remedies, Macdonald possessed just one: Confederation itself, or, more exactly, making Confederation serve as a synonym for a nation’s will to survive.

  As Confederation Day neared, Macdonald wrote to Monck, arguing that it would be “gratifying to the people” if Canada’s new national status could be marked by elevating the title of the Queen’s representative from governor general to viceroy, the same honorific held by his counterpart in the Empire’s “crown jewel” of India. He made the argument that “British North America is now merely a geographical description” and that elevating it to a vice-royalty would reinforce the entity’s status. Back from London came word that governor general was as high a title as Imperial protocol could accommodate.

  Then, suddenly, there was nothing more for Macdonald to do apart from watch Canada become a Confederation.

  Eighteen sixty-seven was something of a banner year for the creation of confederations. There was the North German Confederation, encompassing all the states north of the Main River, which came into being on July 1, and out of which would come Bismarck’s Prussian-controlled German Empire. There was, in February of the same year, Austria’s Ausgleich, or “compromise,” which turned the Austrian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, giving each component state its own parliament and prime minister under a single monarch. And in the wings, rather than on the international stage itself, there was what happened in Ottawa.

  July 1, 1867, was “a hot dusty day,” as Agnes recorded four days later in the diary she had begun to mark her elevation to Lady Macdonald. She continued in her lively and observant style, “This new Dominion of ours came into existence on the 1st, and the very newspapers look hot and tired with the weight of announcements and of cabinet lists. Here—in this house—the atmosphere is so awfully political that sometimes I think the very flies hold Parliament on the kitchen tablecloths.”

  As always happens, glitches occurred. The Royal Canadian Rifles assembled on Ottawa’s Sparks Street to fire a feu de joie, pulled their triggers on command and watched their ramrods, which they had forgotten to remove, make a graceful arc across the street. In Whitby, Ontario, a cavalry troop staged a mock attack on a square of militiamen, but as the Oshawa Vindicator reported, “some of them rush[ed] so closely upon the bayonets as to receive severe thrusts.”

  Inevitably, not everyone regarded the occasion as a festive one. In Halifax, the Morning Chronicle, in a front-page editorial edged in black, mourned, “Died! Last night at twelve o’clock, the free and enlightened Province of Nova Scotia,” while in Yarmouth, no guns saluted the new nation, the ammunition being preserved for use three days later to mark the United States’ Independence Day. The Nova Scotia government went so far as to refuse to allow the Queen’s printer in the province to publish the official proclamation sent down from Ottawa by the governor general. In the new province of Quebec, the bleu newspaper La Minerve reassured its readers that all would be well because Confederation constituted “la seule voie qui nous so it offerte pour arriver à l’indépendance politique.”

  Although mostly confined to Ontario, there was some genuine excitement, even pride, in the achievement. In Toronto, a whole ox was roasted, carved up and distributed to the poor. In Hamilton, huge bonfires burned for hours on the Mountain. The crowd in Whitby swelled to seven thousand. In town after town there were band concerts, parades, picnics, free ice cream, cricket games, croquet matches and lots of speeches. Montreal sponsored a spectacular fireworks display, and there were special celebrations in Macdonald’s home town of Kingston. There were artillery salutes everywhere, usually of twenty-one guns, but in Ottawa, starting at midnight, of 101. George Brown stayed up late writing a nine-thousand-word article that filled the Globe’s entire front page and many of the inside pages. In fact, Brown had little new to say, expressing himself inelegantly in his opening paragraph: “With the first dawn of this gladsome midsummer morn, we hail the birthday of a new nationality.”

  In Kingston, the Market Square was jammed as the Proclamation was read on July 1, 1867.

  At Ottawa, the formal ceremonies were headed by Governor General Monck. He disappointed everyone by turning up in a plain business suit instead of the plumed hat and gold braid people had looked forward to. Accompanied by a single aide, he drove in a carriage to Parliament Hill and then sauntered off to the Privy Council Chamber, where judges, dignitaries, militia officers, senior civil servants and Macdonald were waiting. Monck was sworn in by a judge as the first governor general of the Dominion of Canada, following which he handed over for safekeeping the new Great Seal of the new nation. Afterwards, Monck, accompanied by the newly sworn-in prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, reviewed the troops drawn up on Parliament Hill. That evening there were fireworks displays, and the Parliament Buildings blazed with illuminations.*181

  Real emotion, though, was rare. Surprisingly, perhaps the most uninhibited expression occurred in the Maritimes. The New Brunswick Reporter declared on July 5, “From Halifax to Sarnia, we are one people—one in laws, one in government, one in interests.” In these details, little was actually true. Macdonald’s description of Canada as only “a geographical expression” was far closer to reality. The Times of London came unnervingly close to identifying the limitations and the downright fragility of the new nation: “It supposes a nationality able to command the two oceans it touches, and to raise a barrier of law and moral force extending near three thousand miles between itself and the most powerful and aggressive state in the New World.” For such a task, The Times added, “we look in vain for the body, the vital organs, the circulation and the muscular force that are to give adequate power to these wide-spread limbs.” The Times was being a bit severe: Canada’s population at birth would be close to four million, a bare tenth of that of its giant neighbour but roughly the same as that of the thirteen American colonies when they had set off on their own national journey.

  There was a good deal more to the country than just a new administrative interconnectedness across the immense expanses of geography. For the first time anywhere, colonials had written their own constitution. It was an usually difficult constitution to construct, because it was a federal constitution, one of only four in the world—in the United States, Switzerland and the new North German Confederation. And even if still only a colony—as the independent member Charles Dunkin had pointed out, accurately if cruelly—there was something of the stuff of a nation in this curious new entry on the world’s stage. Just by achieving Confederation, its citizens had shown they did indeed possess some of the will and nerve it would take to survive.

  They possessed another asset. Their leader was Macdonald. Soon his last name would become superfluous: he was about to become known universally as Sir John A. No one else in the country knew politics as well, by a wide margin, as he did. With Lincoln now gone, he knew as much as any leader anywhere about managing a people and a country. He had large and easily visible flaws, and few condemned them more thoroughly than the British-born journalist Goldwin Smith. Yet no one understood better than Smith the sheer impossibility that Macdonald had somehow defied by achieving Confederation. Macdonald, wrote Smith, had been obliged “to hold together a set of elements, national, religious, sectional and personal, as motley as the component patches of any ‘crazy quilt,’ and actuated each of them by paramount regard for its own in
terest.”

  Macdonald hadn’t so much created a nation as manipulated and seduced and connived and bullied it into existence against the wishes of most of its own citizens. The best description of the role Macdonald had played came from his friend Judge James Gowan, who called him Confederation’s “artificer in chief.” By whatever combination of deviousness and magic it took, he had done it. He had made Confederation out of scraps and patches and oddments of thread and string, many frayed and few fitting naturally, but at last it actually existed.

  Now that Confederation was done, Macdonald would have to do it all over again. Having conjured up a child-nation, he would have to nurture it through adolescence towards adulthood. How he did this is another story, and its telling, up to his death in 1891, awaits the second volume of this chronicle.

  The man who made us, just after he had made us, c. 1868.

  Acknowledgements

  A great many individuals made important, and in some instances critical, contributions to this work. My first expression of thanks, though, has to be to someone who played no direct part in the process at all—Donald Creighton, author of the two-volume biography of Macdonald, The Young Politician and The Old Chieftain, published in the mid-1950s. These books are the two greatest achievements in Canadian historiography; no other work even approaches them in the scale of their ambition, in the comprehensiveness and originality of their research and, most distinctively, in the power and persuasiveness of their narrative drive. In later years, Creighton’s stature shrank: his opposition to national bilingualism and biculturalism—“francophobic” was one term hurled at him—isolated him from the mainstream. He died in 1979, despairing of Canada’s future, convinced that it had become “just a nice place to live…but that’s all Canada is now.” Belatedly, revisionism is under way. The historian Donald Wright is now writing Creighton’s biography, only the second ever of a Canadian historian. Creighton indeed could be difficult—prickly, thin-skinned, hot-tempered, if also generous and hospitable. There’s no rule, though, that great artists have to be nice—Picasso is a kind of negative role model. That Creighton was a great historian, there is not the least doubt. He did me the exceptional service of stimulating me, challenging me and at times intimidating me; no writer could ask more of another than to be driven by him or her to stretch to the limit.

  All the causes of my other thanks are more conventional. The best way to express them may be in a rough chronological order.

  This book exists because Louise Dennys, executive publisher of Knopf Canada / Random House of Canada, and Anne Collins, publisher of Random House, decided jointly to defy one of the embedded rules of Canadian publishing—that Canadians don’t read Canadian history. If this book succeeds in its objective of re-introducing Canadians to their past, and so to themselves, with John A. Macdonald performing as a kind of tour guide, these women will have guessed right that rules exist not so much to be broken as to be rewritten. In helping to persuade them to make this decision, my agent John Pearce played a critical role.

  Post-Creighton, with infrequent exceptions, works of Canadian history intended for the general reader have most often been written by generalists—first, and forever the foremost, by Pierre Berton, then by Peter C. Newman and Sandra Fraser Gwyn, and today by Charlotte Gray, Christopher Moore, Ken McGoogan and others. All these writers are filling a niche that the professional historians have, largely, stepped back from in order to concentrate on more specific studies. Yet the expertise and the scholarly standards of the professionals remain the foundation on which the generalists must build.

  Beyond any doubt, the preceding pages contain errors that I should have excised before surrendering the manuscript or never have put to paper in the first place. That there are not many more is due principally to two individuals. George Ekins, reference librarian at the Library of Parliament, was indefatigably imaginative, not just in looking out for what was wrong but in looking for what I should have known about in the first place—everything from Governor General Head’s remarkable memorandum on how Canada should be governed (so reminiscent of Macdonald’s own views) to pinning down for me the genealogy of that supposedly distinctive Canadian mantra, “Peace, Order and good Government.” My debt to George Ekins is immense, not least because he also read an early draft of the text. My debt to the historian Keith Johnson, now retired from Carleton University and the principal authority on pre-Confederate Macdonald, is almost as considerable. He saved me from multiple embarrassments by reading both the first rough drafts and the near-final text.

  Others were as forthcoming. Historian Roger Hall, who played a major role in the process; political scientist David Cameron; social historian Charlotte Gray; and Andrew Smith, just appointed as professor of history at Laurentian University, performed similarly as readers of the early drafts, doing both the grunt work of identifying errors and the creative job of suggesting improvements. Later, I was able to tap the expertise of two historians, Brian McKillop of Carleton University and Donald Smith of the University of Calgary, on important specific topics. Earlier, the geographer Brian Osborne and architectural historian Jennifer McKendry took me on a detailed tour of Macdonald’s Kingston. The journalist Arthur Milnes, himself an outstanding researcher, guided me both through Kingston and into Macdonald’s personal life. I spent a delightful afternoon with Donna Ivey and Norma Kelly going through their Macdonald memorabilia at his one-time residence, 110 Rideau Street in Kingston.

  Those whose job it is to help responded with equal generosity. Maureen Hoogenraad of Library and Archives Canada went out of her way to respond to all my requests. Likewise Paul Banfield, archivist at Queen’s University; Robert Paul of the Diefenbaker Canada Centre Archives; Barbara Pilek of the Library of Parliament; and David Brown of LAC’s Cartography Division. Those responsible for collections of visual material were every bit as responsive, among them Dorothy Farr of Queen’s University’s Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Steven McNeil of the National Gallery of Canada, and Heather Home of Queen’s University Archives.

  It goes without saying that none of those mentioned above bears any responsibility for errors that may remain.

  Research is the fun part of any undertaking of this kind; writing is a self-imposed sentence to hard labour interspersed with the occasional epiphany. There can be few more agreeable ways of researching than sitting in Library and Archives Canada poring over a book or learned journal, or the contents of a cardboard box, and every now and then looking out through the ceiling-high windows at the Ottawa River below and the far-off blue line of the Gatineau Hills. The exceptional Robarts Library of the University of Toronto has no views at all but instead offers the stimulation of students scurrying about in search of data to stuff into essay assignments, and the side benefit of researchers being allowed to explore the stacks and so, sometimes, to come upon an unknown book that may contain long-sought details about some scene or personality. An additional research asset I enjoyed was the work done for me by archival consultant Elizabeth Vincent. A medical friend, Dr. Byron Hyde, applied his expertise to trying to diagnose the mysterious illnesses of Isabella. A brother-in-law, Gordon Fulton, took the photograph of me that’s on the back cover.

  This work went through multiple drafts. Anne Collins first suggested ways to reshape chapters to better fit the narrative through-line. Rosemary Shipton, senior editor for Knopf Canada and Random House Canada, then took over, initially performing the same function and becoming almost a partner in the process of revision and rewriting; working with her was a delight. My copy-editor, Alexander Schultz, and my proofreader, Alison Reid, saved me from yet more embarrassments of detail and grammar.

  The person I’m indebted to by far the most is Carol Bishop-Gwyn. During the three years the project took, and most especially during the nine, obsessively focused months of the actual writing, she protected me from daily reality by weaving a cocoon around me and only occasionally interrupting to interpose a hand between me and the screen and, after the premonitory wa
rning “Earth to Richard,” bringing me up to date on the latest misdemeanour of the dog or on the social obligation that started half an hour earlier. (A comparable sustaining role was performed by a dear friend, Moira Dexter, during my intense research stints in Ottawa.) Carol was also a full partner in the project itself. All the illustrations are of her choosing, her one regret about them being that the mid-nineteenth century predates both the widespread use of photography and the development of newspaper cartoons. The dedication better expresses my thanks.

  A Note on Sources

  These source notes are comparatively short. One reason is that the bibliography of books and articles used during the research is so long. More to the point, the endnotes that customarily identify the sources for quotations and other information in the text have been placed on the website of Random House Canada—to save some trees and to lighten this book’s heft.

  The purpose of these source notes is comparatively modest—to steer readers who are interested in going more deeply into particular topics towards material that should be useful to them. As a side benefit, this approach enables me to identify writers whose insights set me off in especially productive directions. These notes are therefore indicative rather than definitive. They also use the short-form reference style, so readers should consult the bibliography for the full reference.

  For the detailed source notes, see the website at www.randomhouse.ca/johnamacdonald.

  Overview

  The essentials of John A. Macdonald’s story can be found in fewer than ten books. The times themselves—political, social and economic—are recounted in the Canadian Centenary Series, the relevant volumes being Careless’s The Union of the Canadas, 1841–1857 and Morton’s The Critical Years, 1857–1875. Two contemporary works are invaluable: Biggar’s Anecdotal Life and Pope’s Memoirs. The foundation text is, of course, Creighton’s The Young Politician. Johnson’s Affectionately Yours is insightful about relationships within the family. Waite’s Life and World is an elegant essay that includes some interesting information about daily life. Waite, again, in his Life and Times of Confederation has provided the best detailed account (if rather Maritime-centric) of the way we were made.